The Cliff House has been a restaurant built on the rocky
cliffs of the Pacific Ocean at the western edge of San
Francisco. The first Cliff House was built in 1863 and
enlarged in 1868. It was a very popular restaurant with
prominent San Francisco families and U.S. presidents.
Adolph Sutro bought it in 1881. On Christmas Day 1894,
the Cliff House was destroyed by fire. (You have to
wonder what San Francisco would look like today if the
city's buildings hadn't been repeatedly destroyed by
fires and earthquakes over the last 150 years!)
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Sutro
rebuilt the Cliff House in grand style. It opened in
1896 and stood eight stories tall with spires and an
observation deck 200 feet above the sea. It was elegant.
Fortunately, the Cliff House survived the earthquake
of 1906...but sadly succumbed to fire just a year later.
Sutro's daughter Emma built a third Cliff House in 1909.
It was a neoclassical design. The Sutro family sold
the Cliff House in 1937, and it was remodeled several
times. The National Park Service acquired it in 1977,
and the building is currently undergoing renovations
to return to its neoclassical design. From the Cliff
House, there are fantastic views of Seal Rocks and Ocean
Beach.
Sutro
Baths:
In 1881, Adolph Sutro bought most of the western headlands
of San Francisco and made his home there. Fifteen years
later, Sutro Baths opened to a dazzled public at a cost
of over $1,000,000. A classic Greek portal opened to
a massive glass enclosure containing seven swimming
pools at various temperatures. There were slides, trapezes,
springboards, and a high dive. The pools held 1.7 million
gallons of water and could be filled in one hour by
high tides. There were 20,000 bathing suits and 40,000
towels to rent. The baths could accommodate 10,000 people
at a time. It was a real showplace.
San Franciscans
streamed to the Baths on one of three railroad lines.
There were three restaurants that could seat 1,000 people,
and an amphitheater seating up to 3,700 people provided
a variety of stage shows. There were natural history
exhibits, galleries of sculptures, paintings, tapestries,
and artifacts from Mexico, China, Asia, and the Middle
East.
The photos from the 1900's are incredible; it
was a huge, most impressive place. I guess the Sutro
Baths might qualify as America's first waterpark. But
for all their glamour and excitement, the Baths were
not commercially successful. Sutro's grandson converted
part of the baths into an ice-skating rink in 1937,
and a new owner expanded the ice-skating facility in
the early 1950's. The revenues from ice skating were
not sufficient to cover the costs of the enormous building,
and the property was sold to apartment developers in
1964.
A fire in 1966 reduced the Sutro Baths to concrete
ruins. Fortunately, apartments were never built, and
the property is now owned by the Golden Gate National
Recreation Area and is managed by the National Park
Service.
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If
you would like more information, please email us or call toll free at 866-268-8729. For local information,
please call 415-461-4608.
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